A bestseller is a book that is identified as extremely popular by its inclusion on lists of currently top selling titles that are based on publishing industry and book trade figures and published by newspapers, magazines, or bookstore chains. Some lists are broken down into classifications and specialties (number one best selling new cookbook, novel, nonfiction, etc.). The New York Times Best Seller list is one of the best-known bestseller lists for the US. The New York Times Best Seller list only tracks National and Independent book stores; it does not include sales from Internet retailers.
In everyday use, the term bestseller is not usually associated with a specified level of sales, and may be used very loosely indeed in publisher's publicity. Bestsellers tend not to be books considered of superior academic value or literary quality, though there are exceptions. Lists simply give the highest-selling titles in the category over the stated period. Some books have sold many more copies than contemporary "bestsellers", but over a long period of time.
Blockbusters for films and chart-toppers in recorded music are similar terms, although, in film and music, these measures generally are related to industry sales figures for attendance, requests, broadcast plays, or units sold.
Particularly in the case of novels, a large budget, and a chain of literary agents, editors, publishers, reviewers, retailers, and marketing efforts are involved in "making" bestsellers.
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Early bestsellers
'Bestseller' is a relatively recent term, first recorded in print in 1889 in the Kansas City newspaper The Kansas Times & Star,[1] but the phenomenon of immediate popularity goes back to the early days of mass production of printed books. For earlier books, when the maximum number of copies that would be printed was relatively small, a count of editions is the best way to assess sales. Since effective copyright was slow to take hold, many editions were pirated well into the period of the Enlightenment, and without effective royalty systems in place, authors often saw little, if any, of the revenues for their popular works.
The earliest highly popular books were nearly all religious, but the Bible, as a large book, remained expensive until the nineteenth century. This tended to keep the numbers printed and sold, low. Unlike today, it was important for a book to be short to be a bestseller, or it would be too expensive to reach a large audience. Very short works such as Ars moriendi, the Biblia pauperum, and versions of the Apocalypse were published as cheap block-books in large numbers of different editions in several languages in the fifteenth century. These were probably affordable items for most of the minority of literate members of the population. In 16th and 17th century England Pilgrim's Progress (1678) and abridged versions of Foxe's Book of Martyrs were the most broadly read books. Robinson Crusoe (1719) and The Adventures of Roderick Random (1748) were early eighteenth century short novels with very large publication numbers, as well as gaining international success.[2]
Tristram Shandy, a rather long novel by Laurence Sterne, became a "cult" object in England and throughout Europe, with important cultural consequences among those who could afford to purchase books during the era of its publication. The same could be said of the works of Voltaire, particularly his comedic and philosophically satirical novel, Candide, which, according to recent research, sold more than 20,000 copies in its first month alone in 1759. Likewise, fellow French Enlightenment author Rousseau, especially his Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse (1761) and of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's novel, Die Leiden des jungen Werther (The Sorrows of Young Werther) (1774). As with some modern bestsellers, Werther spawned what today would be called a spin-off industry with items such as Werther eau de cologne and porcelain puppets depicting the main characters, being sold in large numbers.[3]
By the time of Byron and Sir Walter Scott, effective copyright laws existed, at least in England, and many authors depended heavily on their income from their large royalties. America remained a zone of piracy until the mid-nineteenth century, a fact of which Charles Dickens and Mark Twain bitterly complained. By the middle of the 19th century, a situation akin to modern publication had emerged, where most bestsellers were written for a popular taste and are now almost entirely forgotten, with odd exceptions such as East Lynne (remembered only for the line "Gone, gone, and never called me mother!"), the wildly popular Uncle Tom's Cabin, and Sherlock Holmes.
Description and types of bestseller
Bestsellers are usually separated into fiction and non-fiction categories. Different list compilers have created a number of other subcategories. The New York Times was reported to have started its "Children's Books" section in 2001 just to move the Harry Potter books out of the No. 1, 2, and 3 positions on their fiction chart, which the then three-book series had monopolized for over a year.[4]
Bestsellers also may be ranked separately for hardcover and paperback editions. Typically, a hardcover edition appears first, followed in months or years by the much less expensive paperback version. Hardcover bestseller status may hasten the paperback release of the same, or slow the release, if hardcover sales are brisk enough. Some lists even have a third category, trade paperback bestsellers.
In the United Kingdom, a hardcover book could be considered a "bestseller" with sales ranging from 4,000 to 25,000 copies per week, and in Canada, the rule of thumb is 5,000 copies sold.[5] There are many "bestseller lists" that display anywhere from 10 to 150 titles.
Differences among lists
Bestseller lists may vary widely, depending on the method used for calculating sales. The Book Sense bestseller lists, for example, use only sales numbers, provided by independently-owned (non-chain) bookstores, while the New York Times list includes both wholesale and retail sales from a variety of sources. A book that sells well in gift shops and grocery stores may hit a New York Times list without ever appearing on a Book Sense list. USA Today has only one list, not separated into fiction/non-fiction and hardcover/paperback, so that relative sales among these categories can be ascertained.
Lists from Amazon.com, the dominant on-line book retailer, are based only on sales from their own Web site, and are updated on an hourly basis. Wholesale sales figures are not factored into Amazon's calculations. Numerous Web sites offer advice for authors about a temporary method to boost their book higher on Amazon's list using carefully-timed buying campaigns that take advantage of the frequent adjustments to rankings. For example, faith healing author Zhi Gang Sha has used this method to create a number of #1 bestsellers.[6] The brief sales spike allows authors to tout that their book was an "Amazon.com top 100 seller" in marketing materials for books that actually have relatively low sales. Eventually book buyers may begin to recognize the relative differences among lists and settle upon which lists they will consult to determine their purchases.
The weight and price of a book may affect its positioning on lists. The Amazon.com list tends to favor hardcover, more expensive books, where the shipping charge is a smaller percentage of the overall purchase price or is sometimes free, and which tend to be more deeply discounted than paperbacks. Inexpensive mass market paperbacks tend to do better on the New York Times list than on Amazon's. Book Sense and Publishers Weekly separate mass market paperbacks onto their own list.
Category structure affects the positioning of a book in other ways. A book that might be buried on the Book Sense hardcover fiction list could be positioned very well on the New York Times hardcover advice list or the Publishers Weekly religion hardcover list.
Verifiability
Bestseller reports from companies such as Amazon.com, which appear to be based strictly on auditable sales to the public, may be at odds with bestseller lists compiled from more casual data, such as the New York Times lists' survey of retailers and publishers. The exact method for ranking the New York Times bestseller lists is a closely-guarded secret.
This situation suggests a similar one in the area of popular music. In 1991, Billboard magazine switched its chart data from manual reports filed by stores, to automated cash register data collected by a service called SoundScan. The conversion saw a dramatic shake-up in chart content from one week to the next.
Today, many lists come from automated sources. Booksellers may use their POS (point-of-sale) systems to report automatically to Book Sense. Wholesalers such as the giant Ingram Book Group have bestseller calculations similar to Amazon's, but they are available only to subscribing retailers. Barnes & Noble and other large retail chains collect sales data from retail outlets and their Web sites to build their own bestseller lists.
Nielsen BookScan U.S. is perhaps the most aggressive attempt to produce a completely automatic and trusted set of bestseller lists. They claim to be gathering data directly from cash registers at more than 4,500 retail locations, including independent bookstores, large chains such as Barnes & Noble, Powell's Books, and Borders, and the general retailer Costco. Unlike the consumer-oriented lists, BookScan's data is extremely detailed and quite expensive. Subscriptions to BookScan cost up to $75,000 per year, but it can provide publishers and wholesalers with an accurate picture of book sales with regional and other statistical analyses.
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Tue, 31 Aug 2010 22:45:17 GMT+00:00
Cult of Mac (blog) ... and author of three books about technology culture: Inside Steve's Brain, the New York Times bestseller about Steve Jobs; Cult of Mac; and Cult of iPod. ...
